close encounters of the Jazz kind

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Monthly Archives: September 2016

You’ve just made the decision to adopt one of the Jazz solutions from IBM. Of course, being the conscientious and proactive IT professional that you are, you want to ensure that you deploy the solution to an environment that is performant and scalable. Undoubtedly you begin scouring the IBM Knowledge Center and the latest System Requirements. You’ll find some help and guidance on Deployment and Installation and even a reference to advanced information on the Deployment wiki. Unlike the incongruous electric vehicle charging station in a no parking zone, you are looking for definitive guidance but come away scratching your head still unsure of how many servers are needed and how big they should be.

This is a common question I am often asked, especially lately. I’ve been advising customers in this regard for several years now and thought it would be good to start capturing some of my thoughts. As much as we’d like it to be a cut and dried process, it’s not. This is an art not a science.

My aim here is to capture my thought process and some of the questions I ask and references I use to arrive at a recommendation. Additionally, I’ll add in some useful tips and best practices. If this proves useful, it will eventually move over to the Deployment wiki.

I find that the topology and sizing recommendations are similar regardless of whether the server is to be physical or virtual, on-prem or in the cloud, managed or otherwise. These impact other aspects of your deployment architecture to be sure, but generally not the number of servers to include in your deployment or their size.

From the outset, let me say that no matter what recommendation I or one of my colleagues gives you, it’s only a point in time recommendation based on the limited information given, the fidelity of which will increase over time. You must monitor your Jazz solution environment. In this way you can watch for trends to know when a given server is at capacity and needs to scale by increasing system resources, changing the distribution of applications in the topology and/or adding a new server. See Monitoring: Where to Start? for some initial guidance. There’s a lot going on in the monitoring area ranging from publishing additional information to existing monitor solutions or providing a lightweight appliance with some monitoring capabilities. Keep an eye on work items 386672 and 390245.

Before we even talk about how many servers and their size, the other standard recommendation is to ensure you have a strategy for keeping the Public URI stable which maximizes your flexibility in changing your topology. We’ve also spent a lot of time deriving standard topologies based on our knowledge of the solution, functional and performance testing, and our experience with customers. Those topologies show a range in number of servers included. The evaluation topology is really only useful for demonstrations. The departmental topology is useful for a small proof of concept or sandbox environment for developing your processes and procedures and required configuration and customization. For most production environments, a distributed enterprise topology is needed.

The tricky part is that the enterprise topology specifies a minimum of 8 servers to host just the Jazz-based applications, not counting the Reverse Proxy Server, Database Server, License Server, Directory Server or any of the servers required for non-Jazz applications (IBM or 3rd Party). For ‘large’ deployments of 1000 users or more that seems reasonable. What about smaller deployments of 100, 200, 300, etc. users? Clearly 8+ servers is overkill and will be a deterrent to standing up an environment. This is where some of the ‘art’ comes in. I find more often than not, I am recommending a topology that is some where between the department and enterprise topologies. In some cases, a federated topology is needed when a deployment has separate and independent Jazz instances but needs to provide a common view from a reporting perspective and/or for global configurations, in case of a product line strategy. The driving need for separate instances could be isolation, sizing, reduce exposure to failures, organizational boundaries, merger/acquisition, customer/supplier separation, etc.

The other part of the ‘art’ is recommending the sizing for a given server. Here I make extensive use of all the performance testing that has been done.

The CLM Sizing Strategy provides a comfortable range of concurrent users that a given Jazz application can support on a given sized server for a given workload. Should your range of users be higher or lower, your server be bigger or smaller or your workload be more or less demanding, then you can expect your range to be different or to need a different sizing. In other words, judge your sizing or expected range of users up or down based on how closely you match the test environment and workload used to produce the CLM Sizing Strategy. Concurrent use can come from direct use by the Jazz users but also 3rd party integrations as well as build systems and scripts. All such usage drives load so be sure to factor that into the sizing. There are other factors such as isolating one group of users and projects from another, that would motivate you to have separate servers even if all those users could be supported on a single server.

Should your expected number of concurrent users be beyond the range for a given application, you’ll likely need an additional application server of that type. For example, the CLM Sizing Strategy indicates a comfortable range of 400-600 concurrent users on a CCM (RTC) server if just being used for work items (tracking and planning functions). If you expect to have 900 concurrent users, it’s a reasonable assumption that you’ll need two CCM servers. As of v6.0.2, scaling a Jazz application to support higher loads involves adding an additional server, which the Jazz architecture easily supports. Be aware though that there are some behavioral differences and limitations when working with multiple applications (of same type) in a given Jazz instance. See Planning for multiple Jazz application server instances and its related topic links to get a sense of considerations to be aware of up front as you define your topology and supporting usage models. Note that we are currently investigating a scalable and highly available clustered solution which would, in most cases, remove the need for distributing projects and users across multiple application servers and thus avoid the behavioral differences mentioned. Follow this investigation in work item 381515.

Most of these questions primarily allow me to get a sense of what applications are needed and what could contribute to load on the servers. This helps me determine whether the sizing guidance from the previously mentioned performance reports need to be judged higher or lower and how many servers to recommend. Other uses are to determine if some optimization strategies are needed (questions 4 and 7).

As you answer these questions, document them and revisit them periodically to determine if the original assumptions, that led to a given recommended topology and size, have changed and thus necessitate a change in the deployment architecture. Validate them too with a cohesive monitoring strategy to determine if the environment usage is growing slower/faster than expected or detect if a server is nearing capacity. Another good best practice is to create a suite of tests to establish a baseline of response times for common day to day scenarios from each primary location. As you make changes in the environment, e.g. server hardware, memory or cores, software versions, network optimizations, etc., rerun the tests to check the effect of the changes. How you construct the tests can be as simple as a manual run of a scenario and a tool to monitor and measure network activity (e.g. Firebug). Alternatively, you can automate the tests using a performance testing tool. Our performance testing team has begun to capture their practices and strategies in a series of articles starting with Creating a performance simulation for Rational Team Concert using Rational Performance Tester.

In closing, the kind of guidance I’ve talked about often comes out in the context of a larger discussion which looks at the technical deployment architecture in a more wholistic perspective, taking into account several of the non-functional requirements for a deployment. This discussion is typically in the form of a Deployment Workshop and covers many of the deployment best practices captured on the Deployment wiki. These non-functional requirements can impact your topology and deployment strategy. Take advantage of the resources on the wiki or engage IBM to conduct one of these workshops.

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